DIFFERENT TRAINERS EXPLAINS US THE REQUIREMENTS NEEDED TO PLAY IN BARCELONA

The ideal Barça player

BNC 08 October 2018 10:19 h.

Just a few players reach the first team

Barça's style requires a very specific prototype of player, so scouters spend a lot of time watching football matches in order to catch that special player that fits in Barcelona.

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For the sports area of ​​Barça, the usual concepts of physical, technical, tactical and psychological recruitment are incomplete, so they shed a little more the vertebrations of these points, based on a holistic classification (it means that it mixes and interrelates the four sections and that does not treat them individually). Thus, they introduce the concept of bioenergetics, which makes more reference to the medical aspect, where the player's biotype, innate conditions, resistance, speed and strength are inserted. There is also the coordination, which is how the player relates to the object (ball), which is the basis of the technique. They add the cognitive section, which is where the player expresses his capacity for comprehension, reading and solutions to the game; and the socio-affective, which is how it relates to colleagues.

"I think it's about spending hours and hours watching a lot of football. In any game, however modest the teams may be, you have to look for players who can be useful. Afterwards, the club's technicians will have to finish training them to become great athletes”, says the scouter Pep Boada. The clubs invest more and more resources in the search of young players, since in this way they save very expensive investments by very contrasted players. In this sense, the English teams become a tough competition because, as Boada explains, "they look for players of 15 or 16 who are about to explode and put a lot of money to take them away. We are committed to a more formative policy.

“The profile of a coach sets a lot of criteria when it comes to signing, and since everyone here starts from the same idea, the player that is looking for has specific qualities that are adaptable to our style of play. Then they can be adapted or not. It usually takes a year to adapt, to understand the game and be useful. More than 90% of the players that come to the first team, never give a better performance than they were giving in the team they came from”, explains the trainer Paco Seirul·lo.

And it is that the 80 athletes who are in La Masía and the more than 400 that are part of the training are chosen from a huge number of children. Explained by coaches and scouts: "The club has thirty or so scouts around the world, people who see around 10,000 videos, 10,000 athletes, of which they end up adding 70 or 80 to the club.

"At the time of signing, we look at everything. The player in Barça has to be good at many things, and you want to be able to understand the game within his position. That within its virtues, it is able to control the game, that it knows when it is necessary to advance, that when it has options to finish it does it, and the same at the defensive level. That they know how to associate is fundamental”, ends the trainer Marcel Sans.